This comparison is usually framed as cheap against expensive. The more useful framing is bounded lookups against complete coverage, because that is where the two routes actually diverge.
What the API is genuinely good at
Looking up a place you already identified. Searching near a point for the nearest few. Getting details for a known place_id. It is documented, supported, versioned and billed — everything an integration wants. For those jobs it is the right tool and this Actor is not a substitute for it.
Why a census is structurally awkward there
The API's search endpoints also return a bounded result set per request. So “every business in this region” is a tiling problem on that route too — the same splitting, the same saturation logic, the same depth. The difference is that each tile is now a billed API call.
The algorithm does not get simpler by paying for it. That is the point worth taking away, and it is independent of what the arithmetic works out to for any particular workload.
The terms attached to each route
The Google Maps Platform terms constrain what may be stored and displayed from data the API returns, and those constraints attach to that route. The web surface carries a different set of considerations. Neither set is empty, and reading the actual documents beats reading a summary of them — both are linked in the sources below.
What google.com/robots.txt declares
Checked on 9 September 2026, google.com/robots.txt disallows /maps/ and /maps?, with a short allow list of specific query forms including /maps?q=, /maps?hl= and /maps?daddr=. It is a short file and worth reading directly rather than through anybody's paraphrase — why robots.txt is a specification.
Neither route is obligation-free
Whichever way the data is obtained, a file of hundreds of thousands of small-business names, phone numbers and coordinates is a file about people in a meaningful share of cases. That is why this Actor refuses eight countries in code rather than leaving it to the operator — the list and the reasoning.
